John Locher / AP
An ambulance is parked at University Medical Center.
Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020 | 2 a.m.
With COVID-19 cases surging throughout the state, Nevada hospitals are experiencing an increase in patients, officials said Wednesday.
The Nevada Hospital Association reports that hospitals statewide are more full than they’ve been at any point during the nine months of the pandemic.
Clark County hospitals are at 87% capacity with patients of all kinds, the association reports. More than one in five of those patients are confirmed or suspected to have COVID-19, a proportion that has been slowly but steadily climbing in recent days. Statewide coronavirus hospitalizations set a record Tuesday with an inpatient total of 1,246, a majority of whom came from the Las Vegas area. And on Monday, there were 1,159 new hospitalizations.
“Nevada continues to see exponential growth in COVID-19 hospitalizations driven almost exclusively by Washoe and Clark counties, which currently account for 97% of all hospitalizations,” the hospital association stated on its data update. “Current strategies are not successfully minimizing the spread of serious disease.”
The association’s Tuesday statistics showed that 81% of beds statewide are filled for all reasons. Intensive care beds were 62% occupied, and 34% of ventilators were in use — the ventilator numbers are roughly the same as in early May, when Nevada returned 50 ventilators on loan from California.
Of course, that’s when cases were trending downward, not upward like the past few weeks which have averaged 1,712 new cases a day over the most recent seven-day period at a 15.6% test positivity rate.
Hospital figures were higher in Clark County, as 69% of the area’s 450 ICU beds are occupied for any reason and 36% ventilator usage as of Tuesday. Locally, although COVID-19 patients filled 24% of available ICU beds, they represented about 35% of the occupied beds.
COVID-19’s burden on Clark County hospitals increased from 18% of all patients on Nov. 12 to 22% on Tuesday, five days later. This is still lower than the burden in Northern Nevada, where 26% of patients were being treated for the coronavirus as of Tuesday.
It’s too soon to say if Gov. Steve Sisolak’s warnings about tightening restrictions to mitigate the virus spread will come to fruition. On Nov. 10, Sisolak cautioned Nevada that he would take stronger measures if virus trends didn’t cool after two weeks.
“We are not currently experiencing a significant downtrend in those numbers. Again, we are not currently experiencing a significant downtrend,” said Sisolak, who is working in isolation from Carson City since his own positive COVID-19 test result last week.
“To be blunt, our state is surging and continues to surge. I’m incredibly concerned about the severity of COVID-19 in our state.”
As of Wednesday, Nevada had seen 125,459 cumulative known COVID-19 cases, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services, an increase of 1,665 from Tuesday.
The governor said he would wait until local jurisdictions’ reports next week, when the two weeks are up, when asked about a possible rollback of reopenings that he knows would come at the expense of a fragile economy.
Julia Peek, the deputy administrator of community health services, said cases being reported now were exposed a week or more ago, so it’s important to stay the course on the “stay-at-home 2.0” plan.
“Actions you take today may not show up in the data for weeks. We’re seeing that right now,” she said. “So if people followed the directives and guidance provided last week, we should start seeing trends and the associated decline, hopefully, if people were adhering to that.”
